“Clean Up Your Room!”

I’m not a messy person naturally. At least, I don’t think I am. But over a few months, I started slipping up, and it began as most habits do…. with a shrug and “nahhh, I’ll get to that later”.

I would leave dirty plates of a dinner before for the next day. I would rush off to school, bed undressed and sometimes, with bathing towel and robe still on said bed. After classes, jeans and bag were thrown on the “chair” ( self-described by my friend, Rasine, as the chair we randomly dump stuff on) to be put away later . And on, and on..

Unfortunately, this seeped into my daily life. The sloppiness. I would put assignments off till the last-minute, take f o r e v e r to put away my laundry, or even get my laundry done. Plates would pile up before I got to them, and my diet suffered. It was basically a roller-coaster of shitty decisions, that I had willfully gotten on, and was fast losing control over. I’m not naturally untidy (is anyone?), but I was cultivating the habit.

Clean up your room!

Those were the words of renowned clinical psychologist, Jordan Peterson in one of his lectures I had stumbled onto his videos on YouTube (due to my watching a previous one of his that had gone viral). It was straightforward, and concise and a sort of blow to my lack of self-awareness of my acceptance of my bad habits, or worse, i was aware of it, but refused to work towards changing them.
Kernels of truth from one his lectures :
1) Clean up your room . Organize your local landscape.

This is one of my major tasks this year. Being more mindful of my space and keeping it tidy. And I’ve noticed, the more i practised this. The better off my mindset was for whatever tasks I had for the day, and when I didn’t.. Well, if you’ve visited my room on a Saturday and seen me in my pj’s watching random videos on YouTube and looking miserable. This is why. It seems like a small change, but believe me, it’s not.
2) Schedule your time. 
Ah, this one needs more work. I’m currently working on having tasks that I want to accomplish and writing them down, but having a time scheduled day is not a current thing for me. But, the first day I consciously monitored my social media usage, (and it was a l o t), i decided that this was definitely a useful skill.
3) Stop saying and doing things that make you feel weak
“Self depreciation” is a topic I plan on unpacking in a later post, as I am a repeat offender. But yes, right now, stop saying and doing things that make you feel weak.

I’m not near perfect. And I’m not trying to be. I just had lunch, so the plate is on the table next to me as I’m writing this (the idea of the post came to me then, and I didn’t want to put it off. Lol, okay… But i am going to wash right after I schedule this post 🙇). But I’m starting where I can, and doing what I can. And I believe the same for you, dear reader.

Personally, I need to listen to his lectures a few times over to, because there’s usually a lot to unpack and go through, so here is a link to the video I curated for this post. It’s a short four-minute video addressing the topic of this post, and I think you should watch it.

I plan on doing more posts like this, where I talk from a personal point of view based on experiences, books, videos, and all. If you enjoy content like these, I’d love feedback from you, by subscribing to the blog &/or leaving your opinions in the comments.

Thanks a lot for reading, and before I go…

Go clean up your room!